Opportunism

This essay examines opportunism as a pervasive but undertheorized feature of modern life, arguing that what is commonly dismissed as a political vice is in fact a structural disposition rooted in nature and systematically amplified by the institutions of modernity. Beginning with the role of opportunism in the Nazi catastrophe and the Holocaust-where widespread conformity and self-interest enabled the rapid dismantling of a constitutional order-the essay traces a spectrum of opportunistic behavior across five domains: the pursuit of personal predilections, fads, and fashion; market behavior and the proliferation of economically wasteful activities (Tinef); the almost systematic exclusion of environmental externalities from economic calculation; the opportunistic incentives embedded in New Public Management and digital nudging systems; and opportunism as a survival strategy in nature. A central argument is that opportunism and the conformist pursuit of personal predilections and fads and fashion are, at their root, indistinguishable social processes, and that the failure to recognize this connection weakens society's capacity to resist both. The essay further contends that the market's allocative failures-in particular its treatment of CO₂ emissions and urbanization economies-constitute a form of institutionalized opportunism whose consequences are grave. Drawing on biology, economics, anthropology, and cultural theory, the essay calls for a broader, cross-disciplinary framework within which opportunism in its many forms can be identified, analyzed, and curbed.